Ted and the CIA, Part 2

How can a reasoning person conflate his personal issues with a cause so that he ends up killing people wantonly and almost randomly?

I’ve struggled with this question for a long time. One answer comes immediately to mind: My brother became the Unabomber as a result of a mental illness involving paranoia and delusions of reference. Clearly, he personalized his sense of the world’s wrong in a way that most of us do not. He wrote in his diary that he’d decided to take “revenge” on society – as if there were some actual entity answering to the name “Society,” as if his victims somehow represented Society with a capital S, as if they had consciously harmed him, as if the concept of revenge made any sense in this context.

The longer I live, the more impressed I am with the remarkable complexity of the human mind. Our minds demonstrate capacities for knowing, remembering, imagining, and balancing all sorts of sensations and polarities. We have the capacity to think (whatever that means) on various levels simultaneously. The focus of thinking shifts involuntarily as well as voluntarily. Even without intending to, we speak like poets, instilling the universe with meanings beyond categorization. The mind is a miracle of integrative functions. It has seemingly infinite ways of apprehending the wider world and of relating to itself. What we call “reality” is arguably a seamless integration of mind and world.

Either by aspiration or accident, we often grow wiser with age. The mind is always changing. Sometimes it decays. It also discovers new ways of enhancing its breadth and power. Meanwhile, the mind is also highly vulnerable – to trauma, to disease, to propaganda, to uncorrected mistakes in thinking. How can a mind, lacking any transcendental reference point, know how to heal or correct itself?

Buddhist teachers say that we all are on a path to mental health, i.e. “enlightenment.” I’ve often argued that violence in the surest sign of a mind in serious trouble; and conversely that practicing compassion is the best antidote to mistaken thinking – the best way to restore our mind’s exquisite balance and integrative functions. A similar analysis, I suppose, can be applied to the behavior of communities and nations.

So, back to the question posed in my latest post: Was my brother a sort of “Manchurian candidate” - programmed to kill by our government in a CIA-funded thought-control experiment gone awry?

This question can be distilled further: Were the Murray experiments – imposed on my brother at Harvard – part of the CIA’s secret MK Ultra mind-control project that used unwitting American citizens as experimental subjects?

I applaud investigative reporters who research such topics, and advocates who push for greater transparency in government. The government has no business getting involved in things like MK Ultra – and if it is, we should know about it.

As concerns Ted, however, I’m not sure that the answer to this particular question matters very much. The outcome is the same even if the Murray experiments were not closely linked to MK Ultra. The human mind – because of its inherent complexity – may be easy to damage and disrupt, but it is also very difficult to control. Thinking clearly and keeping an open mind, I believe, entails some considerable tolerance for ambiguity and mystery. So, while it is not implausible that my brother may have been harmed in a mind-control project funded by the CIA, I think there is insufficient evidence to say that he was.

What seems clear, however, is that Harvard research psychologist Henry Murray and his team were part of scientific culture that failed to learn and recoil from the grotesquely unethical conduct of Nazi scientists who treated human subjects with no more empathy than they would have treated an inanimate object. Science is especially vulnerable to misuse because it has no inherent loyalty to humane values. Its style of inquiry – even when studying humans – is purely objective. In this respect, its understanding of human beings is fundamentally limited. The potential for abuse increases as technology is used to promote hidden agendas of institutions focused on power or profit.

How could my brother kill people and feel no apparent remorse? Maybe his mind was severely damaged. It could also be that he became a spiritual prisoner of the very thing he hated. www.davidkaczynski.com

18 Responses

David:
Very interesting posts. If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to take a look at the “work” of the late (and Albany based) Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. He was another member of the MK Ultra fraternity.
Be well,
Tom

A drug called Columbians devil breath is very powerful mind controlling drug. A special plant is put thru a chemical breakdown with the final product being a deadly toxin. When just a little of this toxin is applied to the victim their mind state becomes very open to accepting any suggestions. The victim is unaware still articulate and shows not signs of being under the influence. Scary world at times -great read by the way.

It was my understanding that Ted was a guinea pig during the 1950s-60s at Harvard when a researcher, someone Gottleib, was experimenting with LSD as a potential mind-control substance for the government. Have you heard about this??

It’s my understanding that Sidney Gottleib was a colleague of Henry Murray, who oversaw the research project that used Ted and a number of other Harvard students as guinea pigs. With LSD-guru Timothy Leary at Harvard at the time, LSD was certainly part of the culture there. It has been reported that some MK Ultra subjects were given LSD without their consent. I was told by a member of my brother’s legal defense team that Ted does not remember experiencing any symptoms of LSD intoxication while a participant in the Murray study.

Al, I don’t see how Ted’s actions were compelled by his beliefs about technology. Perhaps suicide bombers behave rationally within the context of a belief system if they think they are doing God’s will. Even then, though, I think there’s usually a lot more to the story. Ted, I believe, was overwhelmed by negative emotions, including a deep sense of estrangement from the rest of humanity. I also know that Ted contemplated suicide as well as homicide. Does a person in deep despair make a rational choice when he kills others and/or himself? It’s a deep question that I don’t know how to answer. But my intuition tells me no.

David – Interesting what you say about a “scientific culture that failed to learn and recoil from the grotesquely unethical conduct of Nazi scientists;” I agree absolutely, but am brought to mind of the film The Net, by Lutz Dahmmeck, which looks at some length at the role that fighting Nazism played in ideologies of the scientific and cultural communities of America at that time. Clearly there was much that the Americans and the Nazis had in common, as well, in regards to MK Ultra…

It’s not the same thing, but it is fascinating to me that the Nazi inspiration for their eugenics programs was in important ways, apparently, inspired and influenced by American eugenicists…

I assume you know the film, but Dammbeck strongly suggests that your brother may have been a Manchurian candidate… the case for it is quite interesting, although your arguments are far more lucid and straightforward. Has your brother addressed this question at length? (He, of course, briefly corresponds with the filmmaker…). I would be curious if you had an opinion on the film.

Scientific culture when linked to power and funding almost inevitably leads to unethical and inhumane action. Without venturing into the actions of the CIA today as regards human subjects, we need only to read the most recent Wikileaks reports about Pfizer’s dirty drug trials on children in Nigeria to know that these Nazi-reminiscent practices of disregard for human dignity (but this time, for the purpose of profit) continue alive and well. The mental health of your brother was seriously compromised by “science” as is the physical health of those children in Nigeria. Until science decouples itself from power/profit motives and seeks to do more than objectify and vivisect, many more Teds will suffer.

The direct evidence may be lacking, but the overall pattern of neglectful/abusive treatment within these research programs seems clear. If Ted was genetically predisposed to schizophrenia or depression, he would have had a higher risk of susceptibility to the triggers involved in this research. It would be interesting if any of Ted’s victims would try to seek legal redress with Harvard for these studies, although as you suggest, the paper trail may simply not exist anymore. The idea that science and profit can be disentangled seems like wishful thinking at best…..

Human experimentation has negative effects on others and this is a good example of this. The book, HARVARD AND THE UNABOMBER The Education of an American Terrorist By Alston Chase discusses the Murray experiments.

CIA Whistleblower John Stockwell reveals the inner workings of the CIA.
From a lecture of 1989. Topics included CIA destabilizing governments in Angola and other countries and setting up drug cartels as part of covert operations in certain countries.
John Stockwell was the former head of the CIA Angola Task Force.http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Warso
orhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIC7-DnLtg (1/16)
(John Stockwell has several books written, some of them are “In Search Of Enemies”, and “The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order”)

“How to create your very own terrorist state”
Tim Coles takes us through 11 steps necessary to create a “terrorist state”. Using Yemen as a case study, he argues that these steps precisely match US and British policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran as well as Yemen to grow “very poisonous seeds”, some which have ripened while others are ripening.http://www.redress.cc/global/tcoles20100725

Eric Holder told hundreds of Muslims near San Francisco that FBI’s sting operations penetrating mosques across the country are an essential “tool in uncovering and preventing terror attacks”
nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us/politics/12holder-1.html

CIA Whistleblower John Stockwell reveals the inner workings of the CIA.
From a lecture of 1989. Topics included CIA destabilizing governments in Angola and other countries and setting up drug cartels as part of covert operations in certain countries.
John Stockwell was the former head of the CIA Angola Task Force.http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Warso
or
youtube.com/watch?v=WJIC7-DnLtg (1/16)
(John Stockwell has several books written, some of them are “In Search Of Enemies”, and “The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order”)

“How to create your very own terrorist state”
Tim Coles takes us through 11 steps necessary to create a “terrorist state”. Using Yemen as a case study, he argues that these steps precisely match US and British policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran as well as Yemen to grow “very poisonous seeds”, some which have ripened while others are ripening.http://www.redress.cc/global/tcoles20100725

CIA Whistleblower John Stockwell reveals the inner workings of the CIA.
From a lecture of 1989. Topics included CIA destabilizing governments in Angola and other countries and setting up drug cartels as part of covert operations in certain countries.
c-spanvideo.org/program/Warso
or
youtube.com/watch?v=WJIC7-DnLtg (1/16)

WTC 7 is the THIRD tower that came down on 9/11 and was NOT hit by an airplane. Why remained the media silent?http://www.buildingwhat.org